Here are the last few iterations... lowest number of iterations I noticed was round 250...
....
j,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
y,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
s,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
w,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
e,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
j,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
z,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
l,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
f,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
a,c,t,i,o,n,s,n,i,p,p,e,t
found after 361 iterations

When you trace a 2D array to the output window the actual structure of the array isn't clear. For some reason it just appears as a 1D array - this small function fixes that problem - it could also be used to save 2D arrays to text files etc...

This rather large code snippet parses ActionScript style Object syntax. While this is by no means a complete parser - it was easy to write and saved me a great deal of time on a project recently....

I specifically needed support for 1D and 2D arrays as Object properties. If that weren't the case I would have used something simple like yesterdays method. The array support won't work with anything higher than a 2D array (for now... may fix that soon). For fun I also added nested Object support - this doesn't have any dimensional limitation so you can nest as many objects as you want. For instance.. this works just fine:

You'll also notice the added boolean support in the above example. Which was suggested by katopz in the comments of yesterdays post.

Definitely need to add a word of warning here... I wouldn't be surprised if there were a bug or two lurking in this code. The Objects I've been parsing with it are all quite similar... so use at your own risk.

UPDATEs - Known Issues:
1) fixed a bug where if a String property contains a ,{}[] or : character the parser failed.

A very limited way to parse an object from a string... Tomorrow I'll post a better version of this that's a good deal more complex and doesn't really use regular expressions... This works nicely if you don't have arrays as Object properties...

indexOf() searches a string for another string and returns an index... in line 3 above, I search the words string for the smaller string "two" and indexOf() gives me the index of the letter "t". If indexOf() doesn't find anything it will return -1 (as in the case of line 9).

I seem to recall using this in some unexpected places. I'll see if I can dig up an example over the next few days.